How to Evaluate PPC Agency Proposals Without Technical Jargon

Two PPC agency proposals sit on the desk. Twelve pages each. Both are packed with terms you would have to go look up before you could argue with a single line.

So the standard advice says go look them up. Learn enough of the vocabulary to hold your own in the next meeting. That advice sends a business owner into a semester of study just to buy a service.

Ten minutes and a highlighter does more.

The PPC Proposal Vocabulary Was Never the Hard Part

Open either proposal and find the parts you understood on the first read. Contract length. The monthly fee. How much of your money goes to Google rather than to the agency.

All of it clear. Nobody obscures the price.

Then notice where the reading got difficult. It happened in the section describing what they will actually do with the account. Every PPC proposal in the category behaves the same way.

So the difficulty is not spread evenly through the document. Instead it clusters. The cluster sits directly over the promise, which is worth a second of your attention before you go learning anything.

Two Piles, No Definitions Required

Every Google Ads account reports through columns. A finite set of them, defined by Google rather than by any agency selling you something.

Now sort every technical term in the proposal into two piles.

One pile names a column. Impression share. Cost per conversion. Conversion rate. Quality Score. Search lost to budget.

The other pile names an intention. Full-funnel presence. Advanced audience layering. Proprietary bid intelligence. Strategic account hygiene.

Notice what that sort never required. You defined nothing. One thing got asked of each term, which is whether the platform itself reports it.

Both piles read as jargon to somebody outside the industry. Only one pile survives contact with a report.

Borderline cases turn up, of course. Brand lift only becomes a number for advertisers Google has actually run a study for. Share of voice usually arrives out of a third-party tool rather than the platform itself. Neither term is a dodge. They just move the question one step sideways. Which tool produces that number. Will anybody ever show it to you. Ask that instead.

A PPC Agency Term Can Be Technical and Still Be Checkable

Nobody says Quality Score at dinner. Jargon by any measure.

Yet it is a whole number sitting in a column on search keywords. One to ten. Somebody can show it to you this afternoon. The same column is still there in March.

That is the whole property you are testing for. Not whether the word makes sense to you. Rather whether it points at something still standing when you go looking.

Plenty of PPC vocabulary passes that test easily. Which is the part most buyers have backwards. They treat every technical term as an obstacle, then miss that half of them are the only handles on the document.

One Question Does the Sorting for You

Ask it of any term you cannot place. Which column moves when this works?

Then watch how fast the answer arrives. Somebody who already decided what they are chasing answers in one sentence. The number got picked before the page got written.

Meanwhile the other kind of answer widens. More context first. A related concept. Then a story about a different client in a different city.

Two follow-ups exist if the first answer stalls. Where does that column live. What does it read today. Both are answerable in an afternoon by anybody holding account access.

Reply length is the signal. Very little else about the reply matters.

Somebody Will Say Strategy Has No Column

Fair. It is the strongest objection to any of this. Account restructuring has no column. Neither does creative testing. The negative keyword work that quietly saves accounts every month has none either. Real labour, and the interface reports none of it.

Only read what the objection concedes. It says strategy is the work rather than the result.

Every piece of that work aims somewhere. Restructure the campaigns and you are aiming at cost per conversion. Add negatives and you are aiming at wasted spend. Rewrite the ads and you are aiming at click-through rate, then at the conversions sitting behind it.

So the test survives the objection intact. Nobody owes you a column for the labour. They owe you the column the labour is walking toward.

An agency unable to name that column has not chosen one yet. Six months of work will get done anyway. None of it will be aimed.

Somebody Will Say They Are Not Simplifying For You

Second objection. This one usually arrives politely. The detail sits there out of respect. Clients asked for depth. Writing it plainly would read as talking down to a paying adult.

Reasonable enough. So take them up on it. Ask for the plain sentence anyway.

Then watch which direction the answer travels. A term with a column behind it gets shorter under explanation. Impression share becomes how often your ad turned up out of the times it could have. Finished. The explanation now reads easier than the term did.

Nothing behind a term means it gets longer instead. It gathers clauses. Two more terms turn up that also need explaining. Those two arrive with a third.

That asymmetry is the finding. Explanations of real things shrink.

Technical Jargon Is a Month-Six Problem

None of this hurts you at the pitch. You will nod along and sign. Then the campaigns launch on schedule. Everybody is pleasant.

It arrives later. Six months in, you want to know whether the money worked. So the proposal comes back out of the drawer. You read what was promised.

Improved full-funnel presence across the customer journey. Now try to describe a version of those six months where that sentence turned out false. There is not one available. Every possible outcome satisfies it, including the outcome where nothing happened at all.

Compare that against a line naming cost per conversion under a figure on the core campaigns. That either happened or it did not. Ten seconds in the account settles the argument.

So the jargon never confused you in month one. It deleted your month-six question, which was the job it was hired for.

Run the Pass on Both Documents

Underline every term you would have to look up. Count the underlines per page.

Then go back through and write a column name beside each one. Some come easily. A few sit there with white space beside them, and that white space is your finding.

Ratio is what you are reading, rather than the raw count. Twenty technical terms with eighteen columns behind them is a technical document written by somebody who works in the tool daily. Eight terms with two columns is a different kind of document entirely.

Run it on both proposals. The gap between those two ratios usually decides the thing before any second meeting does.

Picture the two proposals on a Calgary desk once a pen has been through them. Fourteen underlines in the first, eleven carrying a column name alongside. Nine underlines in the second, two with anything written beside them. Same price bracket. Both promising the same start date. Nothing else in either file separates them that cleanly, and you never had to learn what the fourteen meant.

The Scope Section of a PPC Proposal Goes Soft

Pricing is normally the clearest page in the file. A number and a term. Payment schedule underneath. Nothing ambiguous anywhere on it.

Then read the scope directly below. Ongoing optimization and account management. So ask how many hours. Then ask which campaigns. Reported where, exactly.

Nobody writes soft scope on purpose, mostly. A junior copied the previous proposal. That one copied the proposal before it, back to a template nobody living wrote.

Same test, different section. Hours are countable. Optimization on its own is not, and it never becomes countable later.

None of this stops at paid search either. An SEO proposal goes soft in exactly the same paragraph. Which is why any website audit you commission should hand back findings you can count. Adjectives are what fill the space when nobody counted.

How SEO Company To-The-TOP! Writes the Google Ads Scope Page

One person writes the proposal here. The same person runs the account afterward. Nineteen years of that arrangement. Started in 2007, with no handoff to a junior once the paperwork clears.

Which changes what can safely be written down. Somebody who will personally answer for a number in March gets careful about the number in September.

So the Google Ads management scope names columns. Cost per conversion. Impression share on the terms a Calgary business actually needs. What lands in the monthly report, plus where you go check it yourself without asking permission.

Ask any Calgary SEO provider for the same treatment. To-The-TOP! reads that way because the alternative gets awkward at the six-month review. The portfolio page carries ranked keyword positions for that same reason.

Nobody at To-The-TOP! will promise a position, incidentally. Positions move for reasons no agency controls. Naming the column you are watching is a different promise from naming where it lands.

Common Questions About PPC Agency Proposals

Do I need to learn PPC before hiring a PPC agency?

No. Sorting terms by whether Google reports them takes no PPC knowledge at all. You are reading the structure of the document rather than its content. Structure is legible to anybody.

What if an agency will not name a number?

Sometimes that is caution rather than evasion. Nobody can promise a cost per conversion on an account they have not opened yet. Still, they can name which column they will be watching. That column was all you asked for.

Is technical language in a PPC proposal a red flag by itself?

Rarely. Practitioners talk like practitioners. A proposal scrubbed of every technical term often means the writer never touched the account. Read the ratio of terms pointing at a report against terms pointing at nothing.

Should I ask for the whole proposal rewritten in plain language?

Asking for a one-page summary works better. Whoever compresses twelve pages into one has a clear plan underneath it. Failing that compression tells you something too.